(Ill. 20.3)
5. The fact that the continuation of the species is seldom in our minds when we ask for a phone number is no objection to the theory. We are, suggested Schopenhauer, split into conscious and unconscious selves, the unconscious governed by the will-to-life, the conscious subservient to it and unable to learn of all its plans. Rather than a sovereign entity, the conscious mind is a partially sighted servant of a dominant, child-obsessed will-to-life:
[The intellect] does not penetrate into the secret workshop of the will’s decisions. It is, of course, a confidant of the will, yet a confidant that does not get to know everything.
The intellect understands only so much as is necessary to promote reproduction – which may mean understanding very little:
[It] remains … much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will.
An exclusion which explains how we may consciously feel nothing more than an intense desire to see someone again, while unconsciously being driven by a force aiming at the reproduction of the next generation.
Why should such deception even be necessary? Because, for Schopenhauer, we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.
6. The analysis surely violates a rational self-image, but at least it counters suggestions that romantic love is an avoidable departure from more serious tasks, that it is forgivable for youngsters with too much time on their hands to swoon by moonlight and
sob beneath bedclothes, but that it is unnecessary and demented for their seniors to neglect their work
because they have glimpsed a face on a train
. By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable, key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer’s theory of the will invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the eccentric behaviour to which love so often makes us subject.
T he man and woman are seated at a window-table in a Greek restaurant in north London. A bowl of olives lies between them, but neither can think of a way to remove the stones with requisite dignity and so they are left untouched.
(Ill. 20.4)
She had not been carrying a ballpoint on her, but had offered him a pencil. After a pause, she said how much she hated long train-journeys, a superfluous remark which had given him the slender encouragement he needed. She was not a cellist, nor a graphic designer, rather a lawyer specializing in corporate finance in a city firm. She was originally from Newcastle, but had been living in London for the past eight years. By the time the train pulled into Euston, he had obtained a phone number and an assent to a suggestion of dinner.
A waiter arrives to take their order. She asks for a salad and the sword-fish. She has come directly from work, and is wearing a light-grey suit and the same watch as before.
(Ill. 20.5)
They begin to talk. She explains that at weekends, her favourite activity is rock-climbing. She started at school, and has since been on expeditions to France, Spain and Canada. She describes the thrill of hanging hundreds of feet above a valley floor, and camping in the high mountains, where in the morning, icicles have formed inside the tent. Her dinner companion feels dizzy on the second floor of apartment buildings. Her other passion is dancing, she loves the energy and sense of freedom. When she can, she stays up all night. He favours proximity to a bed by eleven thirty. They talk of work. She has been involved in a patent case. A kettle designer from Frankfurt has alleged copyright infringement against a British company. The company is liable under section 60,1,a of the Patents Act of 1977.
He does not follow the lengthy account of a forthcoming case, but is convinced of her high intelligence and their superlative compatibility.
1. One of the most profound mysteries of love is ‘Why him?’, and ‘Why her?’ Why, of all the possible candidates, did our desire settle so strongly on this creature, why did we come to treasure them above all others when their dinner conversation was not always the most enlightening, nor their habits the most suitable? And why, despite good intentions, were we unable to develop a sexual interest in certain others, who were perhaps objectively as attractive and might have been more convenient to live with?
2. The choosiness did not surprise Schopenhauer. We are not free to fall in love with everyone because we cannot produce healthy children with everyone. Our will-to-life drives us towards people who will raise our chances of producing beautiful and intelligent offspring, and repulses us away from those who lower these same chances. Love is nothing but the conscious manifestation of the will-to-life’s discovery of an ideal co-parent:
The moment when [two people] begin to love each other –
to fancy each other
, as the very apposite English expression has it – is actually to be regarded as the very first formation of a new individual.
In initial meetings, beneath the quotidian patter, the unconscious of both parties will assess whether a healthy child could one day result from intercourse:
There is something quite peculiar to be found in the deep, unconscious seriousness with which two young people of the opposite sex regard each other when they meet for the first time, the searching and penetrating glance they cast at each other, the careful inspection all the features and parts of their respective persons have to undergo. This scrutiny and examination is the meditation of the genius of the species concerning the individual possible through these two.
3. And what is the will-to-life seeking through such examination? Evidence of healthy children. The will-to-life must ensure that the next generation will be psychologically and physiologically fit enough to survive in a hazardous world, and so it seeks that children be well-proportioned in limb (neither too short nor too tall, too fat nor too thin), and stable of mind (neither too timid nor too reckless, neither too cold nor too emotional, etc.).
(Ill. 20.6)
Since our parents made errors in their courtships, we are unlikely to be ideally balanced ourselves. We have typically come out too tall, too masculine, too feminine; our noses are large, our chins small. If such imbalances were allowed to persist, or were aggravated, the human race would, within a short time, founder in oddity. The will-to-life must therefore push us towards people who can, on account of their imperfections, cancel out our own (a large nose combined with a button nose promises a perfect nose), and hence help us restore physical and psychological balance in the next generation:
Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or even grow into complete abnormalities in the child which will be produced.
The theory of neutralization gave Schopenhauer confidence in predicting pathways of attraction. Short women will fall in love with tall men, but rarely tall men with tall women (their unconscious fearing the production of giants). Feminine men who don’t like sport will often be drawn to boyish women who have short hair (and wear sturdy watches):
The neutralization of the two individualities … requires that the particular degree of
his
manliness shall correspond exactly to the particular degree of
her
womanliness, so that the one-sidedness of each exactly cancels that of the other.
4. Unfortunately, the theory of attraction led Schopenhauer to a conclusion so bleak, it may be best if readers about to be married left the next few paragraphs unread in order not to have to rethink their plans; namely, that a person who is highly suitable for our child is almost never (though we cannot realize it at the time because we have been blindfolded by the will-to-life) very suitable for us.
‘That convenience and passionate love should go hand in hand is the rarest stroke of good fortune,’ observed Schopenhauer. The lover who saves our child from having an enormous
chin or an effeminate temperament is seldom the person who will make us happy over a lifetime. The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love m
aliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of years. We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends:
Love … casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual relation, would be hateful, contemptible, and even abhorrent to the lover. But the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him, overlooks everything, misjudges everything, and binds himself for ever to the object of his passion. He is thus completely infatuated by that delusion, which vanishes as soon as the will of the species is satisfied, and leaves behind a detested partner for life. Only from this is it possible to explain why we often see very rational, and even eminent, men tied to termagants and matrimonial fiends, and cannot conceive how they could have made such a choice … A man in love may even clearly recognize and bitterly feel in his bride the intolerable faults of temperament and character which promise him a life of misery, and yet not be frightened away … for ultimately he seeks not
his
interest, but that of a third person who has yet to come into existence, although he is involved in the delusion that what he seeks is his own interest.
The will-to-life’s ability to further its own ends rather than our happiness may, Schopenhauer’s theory implies, be sensed with particular clarity in the lassitude and tristesse that frequently befall couples immediately after love-making:
Has it not been observed how
illico post coitum cachinnus auditur Diaboli?
(Directly after copulation the devil’s laughter is heard.)
So one day, a boyish woman and a girlish man will approach the altar with motives neither they, nor anyone (save a smattering of Schopenhauerians at the reception), will have fathomed.
Only later, when the will’s demands are assuaged and a robust boy is kicking a ball around a suburban garden, will the ruse be discovered. The couple will part or pass dinners in hostile silence. Schopenhauer offered us a choice –
It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly
– though he left us in little doubt as to the superior capacity of the species to guarantee its interests:
The coming generation is provided for at the expense of the present.
T he man pays for dinner and asks, with studied casualness, if it might be an idea to repair to his flat for a drink. She smiles and stares at the floor. Under the table, she is folding a paper napkin into ever smaller squares. ‘That would be lovely, it really would,’ she says, ‘but I have to get up very early to catch a flight to Frankfurt for this meeting. Five thirty or, like, even earlier. Maybe another time though. It would be lovely. Really, it would.’ Another smile. The napkin disintegrates under pressure.
Despair is alleviated by a promise that she will call from Germany, and that they must meet again soon, perhaps on the very day of her return. But there is no call until late on the appointed day, when she rings from a booth at Frankfurt airport. In the background are crowds and metallic voices announcing the departure of flights to the Orient. She tells him she can see huge planes out of the window and that this place is like hell.
(Ill. 20.7)
She says that the fucking Lufthansa flight has been delayed, that she will try to get a seat on another airline but that he shouldn’t wait. There follows a pause before the worst is confirmed. Things are a little complicated in her life right now really, she goes on, she doesn’t quite know what she wants, but she knows she needs space and some time, and if it is all right with him, she will be the one to call once her head is a little clearer.
1. The philosopher might have offered unflattering explanations of why we fall in love, but there was consolation for rejection – the consolation of knowing that our pain is normal. We should not feel confused by the enormity of the upset that can ensue from only a few days of hope. It would be unreasonable if a force powerful enough to push us towards child-rearing could – if it failed in its aim – vanish without devastation. Love could not induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species without promising us the greatest happiness we could imagine. To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves. We must never allow our suffering to be compounded by suggestions that there is something odd in suffering so deeply. There would be something amiss if we didn’t.
2. What is more, we are not inherently unlovable. There is nothing wrong with us
per se
. Our characters are not repellent, nor our faces abhorrent. The union collapsed because we were unfit to produce a balanced child
with one particular person
. There is no need to hate ourselves. One day we will come across someone who can find us wonderful and who will feel exceptionally natural and open with us (because our chin and their chin make a desirable combination from the will-to-life’s point of view).
3. We should in time learn to forgive our rejectors. The break-up was not their choice. In every clumsy attempt by one person to inform another that they need more space or time, that they are reluctant to commit or are afraid of intimacy, the rejector is striving to intellectualize an essentially unconscious negative
verdict formulated by the will-to-life. Their reason may have had an appreciation of our qualities, their will-to-life did not and told them so in a way that brooked no argument – by draining them of sexual interest in us. If they were seduced away by people less intelligent than we are, we should not condemn them for shallowness. We should remember, as Schopenhauer explains, that:
What is looked for in marriage is not intellectual entertainment, but the procreation of children.
4. We should respect the edict from nature against procreation that every rejection contains, as we might respect a flash of lightning or a lava flow – an event terrible but mightier than ourselves. We should draw consolation from the thought that a lack of love:
between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself.
We might have been happy with our beloved, but nature was not – a greater reason to surrender our grip on love.
F or a time, the man is beset by melancholy. At the weekend, he takes a walk in Battersea Park, and sits on a bench overlooking the Thames. He has with him a paperback edition of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, first published in Leipzig in 1774.
(Ill. 20.8)
There are couples pushing prams and leading young children by the hand. A little girl in a blue dress covered in chocolate, points up to a plane descending towards Heathrow. ‘Daddy, is God in there?’ she asks, but Daddy is in a hurry and in a mood, and picks her up and says he doesn’t know, as though he had been asked for directions. A four-year-old boy drives his tricycle into a shrub and wails for his mother, who has just shut her eyes on a rug spread on a tattered patch of grass. She requests that her husband assist the child. He gruffly replies that it is her turn. She snaps that it is his. He says nothing. She says he’s crap and stands up. An elderly couple on an adjacent bench silently share an egg-and-cress sandwich.
1. Schopenhauer asks us not to be surprised by the misery. We should not ask for a point to being alive, in a couple or a parent.
2. There were many works of natural science in Schopenhauer’s library – among them William Kirby and William Spence’s
Introduction to Entomology
, François Huber’s
Des Abeilles
and Cadet de Vaux’s
De la taupe, de ses moeurs, de ses habitudes et des moyens de la détruire
. The philosopher read of ants, beetles, bees, flies, grasshoppers, moles and migratory birds, and observed, with compassion and puzzlement, how all these creatures displayed an ardent, senseless commitment to life. He felt particular sympathy for the mole, a stunted monstrosity dwelling in damp narrow corridors, who rarely saw the light of day and w
hose offspring looked like gelatinous worms – but who still did everything in its power to survive and perpetuate itself:
To dig strenuously with its enormous shovel-paws is the business of its whole life; permanent night surrounds it; it has its embryo eyes merely to avoid the light … what does it attain by this course of life that is full of trouble and devoid of pleasure?… The cares and troubles of life are out of all proportion to the yield or profit from it.
Every creature on earth seemed to Schopenhauer to be equally committed to an equally meaningless existence:
Contemplate the restless industry of wretched little ants … the life of most insects is nothing but a restless labour for preparing nourishment and dwelling for the future offspring that will come from their eggs. After the offspring have consumed the nourishment and have turned into the chrysalis stage, they enter into life merely to begin the same task again from the beginning … we cannot help but ask what comes of all of this … there is nothing to show but the satisfaction of hunger and sexual passion, and … a little momentary gratification … now and then, between … endless needs and exertions.
(
Ill. 20.9
)
3. The philosopher did not have to spell out the parallels. We pursue love affairs, chat in cafés with prospective partners and have children, with as much choice in the matter as moles and ants – and are rarely any happier.
(
Ill. 20.10
)
(
Ill. 20.11
)
4. He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let
us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan. The darkest thinkers may, paradoxically, be the most cheering:
The Consolations of Philosophy Page 15